This is the second of three articles highlighting the important work of
the veteran owned and operated GI coffeehouse movement. In addition to
providing desperately needed GI support, GI coffeehouses remain one of the
strongest and consistent voices in the antiwar movement - owing to first hand
experience of corrupt contractors, officer misconduct and civilian atrocities.
Coffee Strong at FortLewis
is continuing their September fundraising drive, as they are well-short of
their $20,000 goal. Please go to http://www.coffeestrong.org/
and donate generously. Under the Hood at FortHoodhttp://www.underthehoodcafe.org/
equally deserves your support.

The whole process is classic bureaucratic obfuscation (definition: to
make so confused or opaque as to be impossible to understand). If the
Senate Armed Services Committee were genuine in their desire to end the
deployment of medicated troops, they could have ordered (subpoenaed) the
Department of Defense to turn their pharmacy and psychiatric records over to
NIMH. The Pentagon, which rightly views the health of troops as a matter of
national security, routinely overrules patient confidentiality for any number
of reasons. Likewise the Senate could have enacted legislation ordering Obama
to halt the deployment of troops on psychotropics. They chose to do neither.

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They also decided against enacting legislation forbidding the deployment of
troops with PTSD and other psychiatric disorders. Instead they issued a report
expressing the "strong expectation" that the Pentagon would screen servicemen
for PTSD prior to sending them to the front line. While the Pentagon claims to
have improved their screening of new recruits, there seems to be no change in
their practice of redeploying the 20-30% of troops developing PTSD and other
mental health problems as a result of combat.

Thus in June 2011, Staff Sergeant Jared Hageman, who was hospitalized for
PTSD in the psychiatric unit of Madigan Army Hospital at Fort Lewis, was
ordered redeployed to Afghanistan for the ninth time -- and shot himself in the
head (http://www.coffeestrong.org/).

Fast Forward to March 2011

In March 2011, the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the Senate Armed
Services Committee held more hearings (http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20100608_2900.php),
specifically around the scandalous practice of deploying US troops on mind
altering psychotropic medication. Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-Maryland) quoted
internal Army studies showing that 12% of troops in Iraq
and 17% in Afghanistan
had been prescribed antidepressants, sleeping pills or the antipsychotic
Seroquel. The studies he cited revealed that as of early 2011, 5% of troops
were still taking psychotropic medication.

The DOD: Breaching Their Own Guidelines

All antipsychotics are associated with extreme sedation, dizziness and
cloudy judgment. Yet according to Army Surgeon General Eric Schoemaker,
although US Central Command (CENTCOM) policy prohibits the use of the
antipsychotic Seroquel to treat deploying troops with psychotic conditions, it permits
troops to use it as a sleep aid. This is in clear violation of the 2006 "Policy
Guidance for Deployment Limiting Psychiatric Conditions and Medications,"
issued by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. The latter
explicitly bans the deployment of troops taking medication for chronic
insomnia. With good reason, as Seroquel has been implicated in the deaths of
two Marines who died in their sleep after taking large doses.

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It also came out in the March hearings that CENTCOM allows troops who deploy
to combat a 180 day supply of psychotropic medication -- followed by a 180-day
refill in the field. Col. John Stasinos, chief of addiction medicine for the
Army surgeon general, and Col. Carol Labadie, pharmacy program manager for the
surgeon general, defends this practice: "For soldiers on long term
psychotropic medication, running out and not taking the medications can be as
dangerous as taking too much."

CENTCOM Can't Track Prescriptions (they claim)

In response to questioning, Army Surgeon General Eric Schoemaker was unable
to produce exact figures for the number of troops taking psychotropics (http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20110303_5243.php?oref=topstory).
Shoemaker claims that the defense department -- owing to inadequate funding --
has no way of tracking the prescriptions they issue -- either at the pharmacy
level or in the AHLTA electronic health records of individual servicemen. His
testimony, if true, totally violates basic standards of record keeping
essential for good (and safe) medical care. It has extremely dire implications
for health outcomes of GIs treated by military doctors.

I am a 63 year old American child and adolescent psychiatrist and political refugee in New Zealand. I have just published a young adult novel THE BATTLE FOR TOMORROW (which won a NABE Pinnacle Achievement Award) about a 16 year old girl who (more...)